31 December 2014

ell, it’s New Year’s Eve, and it’s cold here, so I plan to
confine my celebrating to the inside of the house where it’s warm. I had to
spend the day racing around doing things—although most of those things involved
many hours of waiting for other things to happen—and I’m mainly just glad to be
back.

So, anyway, I wish you a happy new year on this seventh day of
Christmas, on the last day of this year 12014 of the Holocene Era.

30 December 2014

oday has gone down the tubes worrying about how I’m going to
make the rent (selling plasma looks like an option) and trying to get in shape
for the upcoming year. One of the things I’m doing is closing the endless
series of tabs that are open in my browser—literally hundreds of them, all (or
most of them) pointing to something important or interesting or at least
entertaining. Well, some of them are only Wikipedia articles I intended to edit
when I got some free time, or a picture I meant to show somebody or other, or a
dead link to something forgotten.

For one example, here is a link (David Edwards, “Mall cop
ignores racist harassing Seattle protesters and pepper sprays black bystander
instead,” Raw Story, 14 August 2014) to
a story about an altercation in a Seattle mall. Some sort of demonstration against
Israel was going on, and a shirtless guy (whose identity appears to be unknown)
started harassing the demonstrators and apparently anybody else who happened
along. (A picture sequence by Alex Garland documents the event.) Shouting “towelhead”
and something that sounded like “sand n*gg*r,” the guy squared off against a
passerby. The photo sequence doesn’t show who started it, but Shirtless Guy was
being aggressive before the passerby—Raymond Wilford—had even showed up, so I
know who I’d bet on. A mall security officer appeared. As the photos show, he
walked right past Shirtless Guy and sprays something in Wilford’s face. A video
beginning shortly after documents the crowd shouting that the mall cop pepper-sprayed
the wrong guy. Police arrived, the mall guard took Wilford away, and things
apparently quieted down. A relatively recent follow-up shows that no charges
were filed against the mall guard. Scott Born, a spokesman for Valor Security
Services who was not there at the time, claims that the mall guard gave
repeated warnings. There is no evidence for this in the picture sequence, but
of course it could have happened between pictures. The city attorney (who also
wasn’t there) claims that Wilford acted aggressively towards the mall guard.
(Again, this was missed by the picture sequence.) When you note that Shirtless
Guy was white and Wilford black it is not hard to see why the mall guard went
for the one and not the other, but as we all keep hearing, in America we live
in a post-racial society, so that can’t be it.

Another tab I have open takes me to the works of Arthur
Clement Hilton, whom I was doubtless researching for a parody anthology I was
putting together before my life blew up when the axe finally fell on the long
saga of The House Just Off Interstate Avenue. The project is actually older
than that; I’ve been putting together a collection of parodies in English
spanning space and time, including not only well-known parodists like Max
Beerbohm and Wolcott Gibbs, but also lesser-known writers, like Barry Pain and
Arthur Clement Hilton. Hilton is primarily remembered for his amazing Swinburne
parody—you know the one—the ode to an octopus in an aquarium done in the meter
of “Dolores”. Almost exactly one hundred years older than me, Hilton died
relatively young, in his twenties. While his reputation (such as it is) rests
primarily on the Swinburne takeoff, he also did amusing and apt parodies of
Ouida and Christina Rosetti. (This is the one that ends:

What are nice? Ducks and peas,
What are nasty? Bites of fleas.
What are fast? Tides and times.
What are slow? Nursery rhymes.

If I recall correctly, Dwight Macdonald included this one in
his anthology in spite of his claim that no parody involving fleas was ever
enjoyable.) I meant to devote an entire entry to him earlier this year—and maybe
I will some day—but for now this will have to do.

Another tab still open links to the Amazon page on M. R. James’
New Testament Apocrypha collection. This relates to one of my irritations over
the past several years. I’ve wanted this book ever since I was young, when I
used to check it out from the Vancouver library to read some of the lost books
of the bible in a more reliable form than Hone’s 1821 volume. (That’s another
blog entry—or rather a set of them—that I have yet to write.) Some years back
thanks to this new-fangled contraption they call the internet, I managed to
locate and buy a copy of the first edition—more for old times’ sake than for
utility, as there are better editions out there now, and this was only a
translation at that. But, I regret to say, it disappeared when my relatives
thoughtfully cleaned out my room for me, getting rid of such old trash as my
Lancer first-printing Conan collection, and my 1950 edition of Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland. (Sad to say, many
members of my family, whom I love dearly, are barbarians. Years ago I noticed
that my 1875 copy of Kit Carson’s Life
and Adventures (which contains an early though inaccurate account of the
Modoc War) was missing. On asking about it I learned that one of my relatives
had it in her room. Are you enjoying it? I asked, somewhat astonished. Well,
she replied, one leg of the bedside table is broken, and it’s just the right
size to hold it up.) Anyway, earlier this year, when I still labored under the
delusion that I would have space for bookcases and books wherever I ended up, I
looked about online for a replacement copy.

So that’s the story of three of the many things that occupied
my thoughts this year. The links follow.

29 December 2014

oday’s saint (among others) is Thomas Becket, the subject of
T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
and Jean Anouilh’s Becket, the former
of which is a personal favorite and the latter of which we had to read in high
school. (There was this movie, you see….) He was also (sort of) the inspiration
for one of my favorite episodes in the Blackadder series. But I’m not (sad to
say) inspired by the subject myself, and therefore will have to cast about for
something unrelated to say.

Fortunately just such a subject is close at hand. Amanda Marcotte
replies (“The unsavory motivations of the Shakespeare truthers”) to a Newsweek
article I haven’t read that (she says) is “a surprisingly sympathetic piece
about Shakespeare truthers”—those raving loons that believe Francis Bacon or
Edward de Vere or Queen Elizabeth wrote the plays and poems attributed to
William Shakespeare, actor and theatre shareholder, of Stratford-on-Avon.

Raving loons is my characterization, by the way. Amanda
Marcotte finds its origin in a “knee-jerk respect for wealth and authority”
that is “fueled by an unsavory classism and hostility to bohemianism that
manifests in an unwillingness to accept that someone could develop as a great
poet without a formal education but merely by practicing through his work as a
writer and actor.” This certainly characterizes some noted writers on the
so-called authorship question—Thomas Looney, Charlton and Dorothy Ogburn and
their son, and no doubt others. These guys are champions of the seventeenth
earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, a bad poet (mediocre is much too kind) who is said by Francis Meres to have written plays,
and who was in fact a patron of writers of the age, including the famous and
influential John Lyly.

Personally I think it is a mercy that his plays have not
survived. Some of his poems, unluckily, have. Here’s a sample:

The drone more honey sucks, that laboureth not at all,
Than doth the bee, to whose most pain least pleasure doth befall:
The gard'ner sows the seeds, whereof the flowers do grow,
And others yet do gather them, that took less pain I trow.
So I the pleasant grape have pulled from the vine,
And yet I languish in great thirst, while others drink the wine.

And here’s another:

If women could be fair and yet not fond,
Or that their love were firm not fickle, still,
I would not marvel that they make men bond,
By service long to purchase their good will;
But when I see how frail those creatures are,
I muse that men forget themselves so far.

The guy that wrote these lines was no Shakespeare. He could
have been the author of Sir Clyomon and
Sir Clamydes, or one of the plays of the era when rhymed and awkward verse
was all the rage, maybe, but not in the age of Kyd and Middleton and Webster.

I skip over the glaring fact that the guy died too soon to be
Shakespeare. Sources for Lear and The Tempest hadn’t even been published
when he died. The teacher Charlie Moore in Head
of the Class dismissed one of his student’s objections on that ground by
saying that it’s true only if you follow the conventional chronology—but that
conventional chronology is solidly based on dates of publication, entries in
the Stationers Register, datable allusions, source analysis, records of
performances, and so on and so forth. One nutjob Oxfordian had the earl writing
Sir Thomas More (a play to which
Shakespeare appears to have contributed part of a scene during a rewrite) in
1580—well before the 1587 edition of Holinshed actually used by its authors.
Another put The Winter’s Tale before
Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the novel
on which it was based.

There are plenty of legitimate literary mysteries out there—but
who wrote Shakespeare’s plays isn’t one of them. Robert Greene, or somebody
writing in his name, bitched about an actor (whom he referred to as Shake-scene)
who had dared to write his own plays, thus robbing his betters of a job. An
anonymous university writer (who obviously considered Shakespeare a
lightweight) lampooned his fellow-actors Will Kempe and Richard Burbage, having
Kempe say, “Few of the university men pen plays well. They smell too much of
that writer Ovid, and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of
Proserpina and Jupiter. Why! here's our fellow Shakspeare puts them all down;
aye, and Ben Jonson too.” The first folio of his plays refers to his Stratford
monument. And so on and so forth.

“It’s true” as Ophelia Benson writes, “that it’s mysterious
how Shakespeare got to be Shakespeare, but you know what? It would be no less mysterious if he were Edward
Vere or Elizabeth Tudor or John Dee or anyone else.” There’s the fact of it.
Occasionally a few people manage to write songs or poems or plays or books that
appeal to their own time. Out of this small group only a handful produce
anything that lasts beyond its moment, that continues to appeal to people out
of its immediate time and place. Even fewer from this group manage to keep
people entertained, interested, intrigued, or enthralled as the centuries go
by. There’s your mystery. Solve that one, if you can.

28 December 2014

’m really hoping to get something out today that isn’t crap,
but that’s looking increasingly unlikely at this point. It’s wet and gloomy out
this fourth day of Christmas, and it’s wet and gloomy inside, metaphorically
anyway.

It’s Childermas, or Holy Innocents’ Day, commemorating the
mythical slaughter of infants by Herod the Great. Fourteen thousand, or
sixty-six thousand—the numbers vary according to the tradition—imaginary children
aged two or less were killed in an attempt to eliminate one infant that might
pose a threat to Herod, according to the story.

It’s true that we don’t know how many infant boys Herod murdered.
We don’t know if it was just the sons of a couple families, a village, or a
whole territory. But does it matter?!? Innocent
infants were killed. They were not myths. They were not fables. They were
babies!

Forgive me if I pour a little cold water on these hysterical
flames. There is no evidence whatsoever that this happened. It is not a matter
of getting God off the hook or whatever, it doesn’t matter that Herod was a tyrant
who murdered any members of his family that might conceivably pose a threat to
his authority, it doesn’t matter that Josephus doesn’t mention this among the
many crimes he attributes to Herod. The point is that there is no actual
evidence.

Our only source for this story is the fabulous infancy
narrative that is the beginning of The
Gospel according to Matthew. It tells how astrologers from the East came to
Jerusalem looking for the child who was to be the Jewish king, as predicted by
a star. Herod is frightened at this news, and calls together the chief priests
and scribes to ask where the future king will be born. They tell him in
Bethlehem. Herod commissions the astrologers to find him, naively trusting that
they will report back to him his location. They head off to Bethlehem, tracking
the star, which comes to a stop over the place Jesus was born, in defiance of
the laws of physics. They go inside, worship Jesus, give him the famous gifts
of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and then go back home by a different route,
so as to evade Herod. They’d had a dream warning them against him. Jesus’
father has a dream too, telling him to get the hell out of Bethlehem with his
family, and he does so. Herod, realizing that he had been tricked, orders all
the infants in the area murdered—but Jesus escapes unhurt, as his family has
fled to Egypt.

There is not one probable thing in this whole fairy-tale
narrative. Astrology doesn’t work in the real world, precognitive dreams never
give useful information, stars don’t move about in the sky and stop conveniently
over a particular house, and Herod was a paranoid maniac, not a blundering
fool. Given his penchant for spies and undercover work, you’d think Herod would
have had the wise men followed—not that anything in this story has to make
sense. It’s a goddamn fable, telling of the miraculous escape of a miraculous
infant, not sober history.

If stars don’t act like this, if dreams don’t work like this,
if Herod wasn’t dumb, then what is the basis for this story? No star, no
astrologers, no prediction, no need for Herod to order a massacre. No massacre,
no holy innocents, no infant martyrs. It’s really that simple. There are good
reasons for putting certain things in—that trip to Egypt, for example. Various
writers pointed out that Jesus could have learned magic in Egypt and it would
have been easy to fool people, when magic was not well understood. Okay, says
this author, Jesus was in Egypt—but when he was an infant, not when he was of
an age to learn magic.

And of course it is always possible that some real event
inspired the story. Herod had young members of his own family killed to prevent
them from becoming a danger to him, for example, and maybe that inspired the story.
Or maybe there was some other fit of murderous madness behind it. But there’s
no need to assume anything of the sort. It’s just a story.

27 December 2014

ell, it’s obvious that I’m not going to get anything out
today. I wanted to write about John the Evangelist—it’s his saint’s day—but things
really aren’t working out. The situation here isn’t conducive to writing; I
have a couch in the living room (for which I’m paying a small fortune) and people
talk here and watch tv and so on and so forth. I’ve got the bandage around my
ears, but it doesn’t help much. Maybe tomorrow.

26 December 2014

his second day of Christmas, the Feast of Stephen, is nothing
to boast about either. Stephen of course was the First Martyr, or Protomartyr,
who was supposedly stoned by an angry mob for making a speech. Apparently some
men claimed to have heard him speak “blasphemous words against Moses and God.”
Some witnesses said “This man never stops saying things against this holy place
and the law; for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy
this place and will change the customs that Moses handed on to us.”

By Wikipedia standards we apparently have to take these words
at face-value, seeing that it was testimony given before some kind of court.
Presumably then Stephen did say that Jesus came to destroy the temple and
change the Torah, especially as he presented no testimony to rebut it. Instead
he made a long rambling speech, concluding with insults: “You stiff-necked
people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are forever opposing the Holy
Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your
ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the
Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the
ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.”
Quickly the audience became an angry mob and lynched the protomartyr, killing
him by hurling stones at him. It was, so to speak, suicide by mob.

And there is some reason to believe that there were early
Christians who taught that Jesus’ coming had changed the Torah; the author of Matthew or its source attacked them
bitterly: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets,”
he has Jesus say; “I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell
you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a
letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever
breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the
same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and
teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Presumably these
were the same “hypocrites” who prayed and fasted and gave alms openly, casting
their pearls before swine, instead of doing things decently in secret, trusting
that God will see them and reward them even if others don’t.

Well, Stephen showed the wisdom of keeping things secret, at
least on an individual level, as “That day a severe persecution began against
the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout
the countryside of Judea and Samaria.” It would be interesting to know who
turned him in. Why, exactly, were the “apostles” left unmolested when the rest
of the church was persecuted? What were the connections among the “apostles,”
the accusers, and the authorities? Likely we’ll never know, but there’s no law
against speculation.

25 December 2014

guess I’ve got nothing
to say this first day of Christmas. The Christmas dinner we’d planned ended up
in disaster, and I’m going to head out soon and try to find something not too
horrible to eat. I intended to write something on the nativity, or whatever,
but I guess I’ll just wish everybody a merry Christmas. And look out for the
horsecars.

24 December 2014

ome dumbass clown—his lawyer describes him as “a goofball who
writes funny songs”—regaled the audience at an Elks Lodge charity event with a
poor rendition of Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” He had fitted it with new
words in the manner of (say) Mark Russell or Weird Al Yankovic or the Barron
Knights, but without any of their their wit or skill. (And honestly, that’s not
a high bar.) Instead of being about bad, bad Leroy Brown the song is now about
dead, dead Michael Brown.

Yes, that’s right, this piece of excrement in human form was
indeed making fun of the unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by a police
officer who felt the kid might somehow be a threat to him. Gary Fishel—the
clown in question—may well write funny songs as his lawyer claims, but this
sure as hell isn’t one of them. The available recording begins:

… Michael Brown
Learned a lesson about a-messin'
With a badass po-lice-man.

And he's bad, bad Michael Brown,
Baddest thug in the whole damn town,
Badder than old King Kong,
Meaner than a junkyard dog.

It is heartening to report that the Elks Lodge audience, about
half of which were police officers, was not amused, according to accounts. The
host—a retired LAPD officer named Joe Myers—apparently had no problems with it.
“How can I dictate what he says in a song?” the guy asked irrelevantly. “This
is America. We can say what we want.”

What Gary Fishel wanted to say was:

Two men took to fightin'
And Michael punched in through the door.
And Michael looked like some old Swiss cheese
His brain was splattered on the floor.

Why he wanted to spew this dreck is anybody’s guess. His
lawyer said he figured an audience of police officers “would get a kick out of
it.” My opinion of the police as a group has sunk greatly in the past couple of
months, but even I wouldn’t have thought that they would find this funny. (It
isn’t for one thing. It’s just dumb.)

And he's dead, dead Michael Brown,
Deadest man in the whole damn town.
His whole life's long gone,
Deader than a road-kill dog.

To each his own. If I could put the two of them in a bottle and
set it adrift till eternity passes away, I probably would. But there never seems
to be enough time to do the things you want to do, once you find them. Me, I
don’t think of the deadest man in the whole damn town. I think of the kid with
the bright future who made the mistake of running into a killer cop.

o if you post about your gratitude to the NYPD right after one of
its officers has once again gone unpunished for the cruel killing of a Black
man, and as protests march right down the block where your coffee shop stands,
that has a context, too.

I suppose it can feel like this is all a huge burden. Why shouldn’t
you be able to just say what you think and feel without being held responsible
for decades or centuries of terrible things done in the service of the beliefs
that you are expressing? It’s true that what happened is not your
responsibility, and every terrible thing done by people who believe the same
things you believe is not your fault.

But that is why what you say hurts people, and that is why they
warn you where your beliefs may logically lead.

23 December 2014

aturnalia week draws to an end with the decidedly
nontraditional celebrations of Festivus and HumanLight. Festivus is the older
of the two, going back to the 1970s (and first popularized by a Seinfeld episode of 18 December 1997),
while HumanLight is the invention of members of the New Jersey Humanist Network
in 1998 (first celebrated 23 December 2001).

Both seem to be intended as alternatives to the familiar Pagan
/ Christian / Commercial holiday of Christmas. Where Christian Christmas
celebrates the intrusion of the paranormal into the natural world, HumanLight features
“the unique human capacities for reason and compassion”. Where Commercial
Chri$tma$ promotes consumerism, Festivus deliberately strips down the holiday
(as symbolized by the unadorned aluminum pole rather than an elaborate
Christmas Tree). Neither celebration has yet acquired the annoying religious
advertising that unfortunately infests Christmas.

HumanLight, honestly, is so stripped-down you can hardly call
it a holiday at all. It doesn’t really happen on any particular day—just whatever
convenient occasion (a day off say) falls near the 23rd of December. There are
no fixed elements because “Humanists tend to shy away from both rigid thinking
and rituals”; it looks like little more than a social gathering with a
color-scheme—red, blue, and gold, standing for reason, compassion, and hope. Celebration
suggestions include those things that used to make Unitarian parties for kids
so dismal—educational entertainment, audience sing-alongs, face-painting.
Performances by magicians, jugglers, and comedians are also suggested. Forgive
me for saying so, because I admire the sentiments of the occasion, but a
HumanLight celebration is pretty damn close to my idea of hell.

Festivus, on the other hand, has its rituals. There is the
low-maintenance Festivus pole, for example. There is the Airing of Grievances,
where “each participant tells friends and family of all the instances where
they disappointed him or her that year”. There is a Festivus dinner, followed
by the Feats of Strength, in which “the head of the household tests his or her
strength against one participant of the head's choosing”. It’s minimalistic,
rather like a Samuel Becket play performed by a community theatre sans budget,
but at least there is something distinctive about it. I believe I’ll pass,
personally, but it sounds more fun than a HumanLight dinner featuring readings
from Humanist authors, thank you.

As far as I can tell there are no Festivus songs. HumanLight
has co-opted John Lennon’s “Imagine” and Madonna’s “Holiday”, and created in
addition its own “HumanLight” and “Decorate the Tree of Knowledge” (Sonny
Meadows), “These Three Flames” (Monty Harper) and “HumanLight Song” (Sara Brown).
I haven’t heard any of them, except the ubiquitous “Imagine”, but they’ve got
to be better than “The Little Drummer Boy” or “Do You Hear What I Hear?” (I say
rashly).

Both holidays eschew the solstice with its pagan religious
overtones. That may be a good thing, but ultimately seems to leave them
rootless. At least the old traditions and symbols are ultimately rooted in the
natural world around us. Evergreen boughs and holly, lights and candles—it doesn’t
matter whether we are honoring Odin or Jesus or no-one at all. We continue the
custom even as we assign different meanings to it. After all, as Latka Gravas (to
borrow from a different situation comedy) observed, “the only things that
separate man from the animals are superstition and mindless ritual.” These
denatured holidays have all the fizz of flat cola. They leave out the heart of
the thing, and are ultimately as unsatisfying as decaffeinated coffee or
alcohol-free beer.

es, this nation will stand by and allow those who tortured to have
perpetual immunity for their actions. American exceptionalism really means that
we don’t think we have to follow the law that other nations follow. We do
whatever the fuck we want and we threaten and bully anyone who disputes our
right to do so.

22 December 2014

hose tidings of comfort and joy keep rolling in this Yuletide.
New York's finest ruin what ought to have been a solemn moment in remembrance
of fallen comrades with a political display of childish petulance. In a similar
tantrum North Korea seemingly has translated its objections to a film into
cyberspace, and now finds itself embroiled in a cyberwar. Sixties icon Joe
Cocker is no more. Fake-history purveyor David Barton threatens lawsuits against
those who expose his historical errors.

I’d like to write about something joyous or at least
comforting but the words stick in my fingers. There’s no joy this season, just
empty promises of small comfort. I think I have a right to feel dismayed, thank
you very much. Maybe I shouldn’t exercise that right, but the pickings are
thin. Still, for those of you ladies and gentlemen who still can, God rest you
merry, and with true love and brotherhood each other now embrace. ’Tis the
season to be jolly after all.

21 December 2014

December is the feast
day of the disciple Thomas, at least on some calendars. He was one of the
Twelve, allegedly selected by Jesus himself to represent the movement. So the
synoptic gospels, anyway, though the various lists differ in details. Thomas is
on all of them, anyway, and so was presumably one of the followers to whom the
risen Jesus presented himself, as Paul relates.

Thomas died a natural death according to Heracleon, though
other authorities insist he came to a bad end in some way or another. The Acts of Thomas sends him off to
India in a series of more or less allegoric scenes involving Jesus selling him
as a slave and him building the king a palace in heaven—stuff like that—but I
think he ends up getting a spear run through him.

The fact is that most of the followers who were allegedly in
Jesus’ inner circle, to whom he appeared after he rose from the dead, promptly
disappear from the narrative and are never heard from again. You want to know
what really happened to Nathanael or Levi or Philip? If other movements are any
parallel there is no guarantee that they even remained in it. Tradition may
well be silent about them because there was nothing to tell. First the guy
followed the Baptist until he got beheaded, then followed Jesus until he got
crucified, then followed maybe Simon Magus or somebody else until the clock ran
out on that guy’s moment of fame. Or gave up the whole thing and turned to
something more profitable and less likely to end badly.

The fourth gospel has probably the most memorable scene
involving Thomas. It looks obvious that its author had some sort of beef with
him, or with his followers. When Jesus announces his insane project of going
back to Judea to raise Lazarus from the dead, and the other disciples point out
that the Jews had been quite ready to stone him just a bit before, the author
has Thomas give it a backhanded endorsement: “Let’s go too—and die with him.” (Pedro
de Ribadeneyra tries to paint it up a bit, calling it “a sign of the great loue
which he had towards his diuin Majesty, seing that he was willing to lay down
his life for him”.)

But the fourth evangelist’s attitude towards Thomas is
manifested at the end of the original gospel, when he has Thomas refuse to
believe that Jesus has risen on the mere say-so of eyewitness testimony. An
extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. Thomas will not believe
until he sees for himself—and only when the animated corpse of Jesus appears to
him does he come around to belief. (My suspicion is that the author was taking
a jab at followers of Thomas who claimed that the risen Jesus had been
immaterial—but I don’t insist on it.) In any case the evangelist is quite clear
on one thing: his Jesus commends
those who believe without evidence over those who require some basis for
belief. Stark credulity is the appropriate response on hearing of Jesus’
resurrection—not a demand for confirming evidence. Thomas’s skeptical faith is
the wrong response; he should have believed
in the resurrection sans evidence, just because somebody told him it had
happened.

This is a good attitude for those who are peddling nonsense.
The Beloved Disciple’s followers no doubt found it comforting, seeing as they
were being called upon for belief without evidence, the more so as the first
century CE came to its termination and the original generation died off. It’s a
convenient out.

But Thomas’s attitude is really the right one; belief without
evidence leads people to ignore the effectiveness of vaccination, for example,
or to deny that the earth really is getting
warmer, no matter what the thermometers say. Likely the historical figure that
lies behind the legend was as credulous as the next guy—but whatever he may have been like, his legendary
counterpart is a beacon of rationality that briefly shines through the darkness
of the narrative. The author may have condemned him for it—but the character
served as a reminder of the virtues of the skeptic.

or whatever reason, the winter solstice has always seemed to
me to be the real holiday—relatively obscure, comparatively unheralded, but the
one that actually mattered among the host of winterfests that swirl about these
dark days of December.

Of course that always
covers a certain amount of ambiguity—way back when I was still trying to figure
out who drained the ocean so it could be cleaned and what the relationship of
frogs to crickets was I’m sure I just accepted whatever madness was going on in
society at large as the way things were,
but I don’t really remember it. It seems like I’ve always known that the earth
was tilted at an angle from the sun and that the direction the axis is facing determines
the seasons, and that there were holidays associated with it.

Ours of course was Krissmus, and I can still recall my
incredulity when my mother explained that the Kriss was really Christ and the
name was a corruption of Christ-mass. It was bad enough that Santa was really
my parents sneaking around when we were asleep, but on top of that the coolness
of the holiday really evaporated when it turned out to be just a tawdry advertisement
for some religious cult.

And the words to the carols they taught us in school—a relentless
drumbeat of propaganda. Holy infant, the little Lord Jesus, remember Christ our
savior was born on Christmas Day. (I liked the part about the witch, his mother Mary until my mother explained that it was which, not witch; another cool feature down the tubes.)

Some of it made sense to me—the lights reminding us of the return
of the sun, the evergreen and holly wreaths symbolizing the promise of spring,
and so on and so forth. And presents and fudge and nuts and all that was always
welcome. But by fifth grade I refused to call it Christmas; the Encyclopedia Americana said that Isaac
Newton was born on 25 December, so it was Newton’s Birthday for me, and I had
an altercation with my fundamentalist teacher over my holiday drawing of a
prism splitting a beam of light into a rainbow or whatever; she thought I
should have portrayed the three wise men following the star to Bethlehem, a
task not only against my inclinations, but far beyond my artistic ability.

In all fairness, I did enjoy her regaling us with accounts of “Christmas
is Many Lands,” covering the customs of leaving shoes out for St. Nicholas,
wearing a crown of candles for St. Lucia, going out trick-or-treating for
Hogmanay, and so on. (I may not be recalling the details correctly.) And seeing
her go ballistic when some other kid spelled Christmas with an X (Don’t you dare take the Christ out of Christmas!)
was, well, unforgettable.

It was a dark wet solstice three years later (and how great
the distance was between fifth and eighth grade then) when in English we
stopped by Frost on the darkest evening of the year. I knew very well whose
woods these were by then, but it had never occurred to me that the poem might
well take place on the solstice, as one of my classmates interpreted it. God,
those woods were lovely, dark, and deep…

Many miles later down that road (but only five years in real
time) when I was trying to learn Greek while my fellow-students were out “marching
and burning” as the late great Harlan Howard put it I heard what I took to be
the great solstice song of all time, George Harrison’s “Here Comes the Sun”. For
a moment I felt the ice slowly melting even if it did seem like years since it
had been clear. It wouldn’t last; ahead of me lay suicidal thoughts and
madness, years of depression occasionally lit by moments of sheer raw panic,
but for that moment it was all right.